Rick Vito has one of the most impressive resumes of any rock guitarist, highlighted by stints with Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, along with some new solo CDs of his own, but his most familiar work is probably heard on the Chevy Truck television commercials that have been running for the past seven years. That's Vito playing the long, slow sliding electric guitar behind Bob Seger's vocal on "Like a Rock."

The warm, full guitar sound comes from the single P-90 pickup of Vito's 1956 Gibson Les Paul TV model. The TV was essentially a Les Paul Jr. with a yellow wash finish, described variously in 1950s catalogs as natural, limed oak or, as it's most commonly known today, limed mahogany. Vito found his guitar in 1979 or 1980 at Los Angeles vintage dealer Norman's Rare Guitars.

"It was just one of those guitars," he recalls. "I picked it up and thirty seconds later it was mine. It was just one of those things. It's just got that one pickup on it. All I ever did was raise the strings and put real thick strings on it. I don't even know if it would work as a regular guitar. It's always been a slide guitar for me. It just had a sound. I just knew."

A few years later, in 1985 or early 1986, he got a call for a Bob Seger session. "I went down there and met Bob and asked what he wanted," Vito says. "He said, 'I've got this song and it's got a real long passage and there's nothing there.'"

Vito listened to the tape of "Like a Rock," which was complete except for the solo section. Seger had already tried a saxophone, and it hadn't worked out. Vito told him, "Sounds like slide to me." Seger said he didn't really want a slide part there, but Vito said, "Let me try something and if you don't like it, we'll move on."

Vito plugged in his Les Paul TV and started playing. "It was a first take," he recalls. "The only thing I went back and fixed was the last three chords because I didn't know where it ended. I went back and tried it again, but I never got it again. It's a classic example of turning off your brain and letting your instincts take over."

On his most recent work, Vito has once again looked to Gibsons for the right sound. His Band Box Boogie CD features a vintage Gibson ES-150, an f-hole archtop with a single P-90 pickup, for electric finger-picking parts, and a recent turquoise-finished Epiphone Emperor Regent, also an f-hole archtop, that he plays acoustically and also with a floating DeArmond pickup.

The music on Band Box Boogie is "more in the jump blues, swing feel, with some rock and roll," he explains. "I would say that the rock and roll is drawing from an early era. I like that territory in between Louis Jordan and Little Richard, back when B.B. King was doing that kind of swing feel to a lot of his stuff and really stretching out on his guitar. It took a lot of inspiration from early B.B. and Charlie Christian and Django and Tiny Grimes.

"I'd say in the last six, seven years I've gone back and made an even closer study of that whole thing, the Big Joe Turner thing, that whole era when swing branched out into jazz and also rock and roll. That core area in there, like Louis Prima. The feel was incredible. It's so infectious, it goes over so well live. I didn't want to do just another swing record because they didn't capture the blues influence."

Band Box Boogie has a definite swing element, thanks in a large part to a sax section on most cuts (it's actually Nashville sax man Jim Hoke playing all the parts), but Vito has a second new CD that is more heavily blues-oriented. Lucky Devils is compiled, remixed and remastered from a pair of CDs he did for European release, Lucky Devils and Crazy Cool.

Vito started out as a rock and roller. Growing up in the Philadelphia suburb of Darby, he was a devotee of the local "Bandstand" TV show (pre-Dick Clark), which featured a steady stream of rock and roll acts. He also religiously watched "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett" to see teen star Ricky Nelson and his hot guitarist James Burton. He had started his own career as a guitarist, backing a doo-wop group, when he saw the Rolling Stones. At that point he not only dedicated himself to mastering all the Stones' guitar parts, he began immersing himself in the music that had inspired the Stones - the music of blues artists such as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. For slide guitar inspiration, he says, "I spent a lot of time listening to Robert Nighthawk and Tampa Red and Elmore James, of course, and Earl Hooker. But then I like the way somebody like Ry Cooder did, starting at that same places and coming out with something fresh. I've always tried to do that, too."

He got his first big break when he sat in with Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, whose band would at times feature such influential musicians as Eric Clapton, Duane Allman and Leon Russell. On Delaney's advice, Vito to moved to L.A., where he began establishing himself as a session player as well as a live show guitarist. In 1974, he joined a new version of the Bluesbreakers put together by British blues legend John Mayall and recorded four albums with the group. In the 1980s he performed and recorded with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Bob Seger. In 1987 he got a call from Mick Fleetwood, whom he had met on a session with guitarist Billy Burnette. Lindsey Buckingham had just left Fleetwood Mac and Vito was invited to join the band.

"The best thing that ever happened to me as far as playing with other people was Fleetwood Mac," Vito says, "because I was actually a member of that band. The first tour was a lot of hits, but what was really cool was that they encouraged me to do some songs in the show. I didn't have any songs of my own that had been recorded by them, so I went back to the Peter Green era and pulled out a few of those things and put them back in the set and all of a sudden Mick and Jon (bassist Jon McVie) were transformed back into that era. It was a lot of fun for them and for me. I got to play some really bluesy things. That was the band that I was influenced by - I loved Peter Green."

Vito has owned and played numerous guitars through the years, including some recent Art Deco-styled models of his own patented design, but on Band Box Boogie he ended up back where he started out - on an ES-150. "Oddly enough, my first electric guitar was one of those 150s with the one P-90 pickup in the neck position, fat body and sunburst finish," he says. "I stayed with that for a number of years. In the first wave of interest in Les Pauls I became fanatically dedicated to finding one. There was no network of vintage guitars where you could go to a store and buy a magazine. You had to search it out. Finally, somebody called me with a '58 goldtop with humbuckers. He wanted an SG because he was an Eric Clapton fan. I had some cheap guitar and 150 bucks saved, and I went to a store. This guy had a red SG-style Les Paul. I traded my 150 bucks and my crummy guitar for it and then traded that for the goldtop."

Vito's guitar arsenal today includes an original Flying V and an original Explorer that he found in a bar. "It was everybody's dream," he says "going into a bar and seeing somebody playing the impossible guitars to find." He also has a second Les Paul Jr. that he uses for slide work. "That was a basket case. All the hardware had been stripped off. And the finish. It was a hunk of wood, really. I decided to do my Art Deco customizing of that guitar. I found a few P-90s, did a really interesting paint job and put a pan switch on it. That's a guitar that I use a lot for slide."

Since leaving Fleetwood Mac, Vito has moved to Nashville and concentrated on his solo career, which has taken a variety of directions. In addition to recording four of his own albums, he produced Austin rocker Rosie Flores' 2001 CD Speed of Sound. He launched an acting career playing a commando team leader in the Robert Redford film The Last Castle. And his song "It's 2 a.m.," recorded by Shemekia Copeland, won the W.C. Handy Award for Blues Song of the Year. Currently he's producing an album by new artist Kim Ford, a project he describes as "crossing a bunch of influences and doing an acoustic record that doesn't sound like an acoustic record, like a really soulful mix of gospel, blues and country-blues."